Urban Wildlife: Carnivores Come to the City

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In July 2016 Chicago’s City Council approved a measure that tacitly protected urban wildlife; the measure called on animal-control officials not to disturb coyotes found within Chicago unless they acted aggressively or otherwise threatened people. As urban environments continued to expand throughout the world, wildlife officials and politicians began to realize that cities were ecosystems that supported a huge number of species and that careful research and management were needed to ensure coexistence between humans and urban wildlife.

Understanding Urban Ecosystems.

Humans routinely encountered wild animals in urban environments, yet some of the more-compelling examples included brushes with larger predators. Alligators, for example, were becoming more common in urban Florida, sometimes attacking people and pets, such as the well-publicized June 2016 incident at a lagoon at Walt Disney World in Orlando that resulted in the death of a small child. In the middle of a spring day in 2007 in Chicago, a coyote (Canis latrans) walked into a Quizno’s sandwich shop. In Portland, Ore., in 2002, another coyote stepped onto a commuter train and lay down on a seat. In California, sightings of mountain lions—such as the famous P-22, a male mountain lion that in 2012 crossed freeways in Los Angeles for a new habitat in Griffith Park—were on the rise. Humans were often completely unprepared for those unexpected confrontations in the hearts of major cities, which seemed at odds with the classic narrative that wildlife belonged in nature areas and remote, faraway places rather than where people lived and worked.

Mountain lion P-22 in front of Hollywood sign in Griffith Park, Los AngelesA male mountain lion designated P-22 prowls his domain in Griffith Park in Los Angeles. P-22 crossed two freeways in 2012 to reach the urban park and in 2016 was thought to have killed a koala in the nearby Los Angeles Zoo.Steve Winter/National Geographic Creative

Coyote in ChicagoA coyote sniffs a tree in Lincoln Park in Chicago. More than 2,000 coyotes were believed to live within the Chicago city limits.Urban Wildlife Institute, Lincoln Park Zoo

Such a viewpoint was, of course, naive. Wildlife had resided in cities as far back as any record keeping, with some species such as brown rats (Rattus norvegicus), pigeons (Columba livia), and tree squirrels particularly successful at flourishing in human-modified landscapes. The discipline of wildlife management dated back to the 13th century; wildlife ecology was formalized only in the 1930s; and significant scientific attention was not really paid to animals in cities in North America until perhaps the 1970s. As a result, the study of urban wildlife was an extremely young discipline, with massive knowledge gaps remaining.

That lack of understanding was perhaps warranted, given that while cities had long been a focus of human activity and commerce, only by 2008 did a majority of the world’s population live in them. There were only 2 megacities with more than 10 million inhabitants in 1950, but there were approximately 30 such places in 2015. In short, urban regions had become more common, and there therefore was not a rich history of data to consult. The rapid transformation of Earth’s surface from pristine landscapes to those specialized for human use was only accelerating. As those new urban landscapes appeared across the globe, ecologists, wildlife biologists, and others worked rapidly to try to understand urban regions, which were among the world’s fastest-growing ecosystems, and the wildlife that resided in them.

Analysts had since recognized that urban areas differed ecologically from more-pristine systems; urban areas exhibited an altered hydrology, atmosphere, and regimes of temperature, light, sound, and food availability, along with countless other factors. Possibly as a result of those changes, which were often relatively consistent between cities, early researchers noted that urban wildlife diversity was “homogenized”—meaning that the same species were relatively abundant across a wide range of different urban regions. While biodiversity was frequently lower in cities than in surrounding habitats, that scenario was not always the case, and some research showed that diversity peaked in suburban habitats or at the interface between natural and disturbed landscapes. Many studies found that densities of several wildlife species were quite high in cities, a factor that was likely due to abundant resources that were available for those that could take advantage of them.

The Emphasis on Urban Carnivores.

An evaluation of the published literature on urban wildlife revealed some broad trends. Most urban-wildlife research was conducted in North America, Europe, and Australia, and much of that work focused on the habitat needs of birds. Since about the year 2000, increased attention had been paid to invertebrates, amphibians, reptiles, and especially mammals—with an emphasis on mammalian carnivores. Carnivore species had long been viewed as competitors for game at best and direct threats to human health and livelihood at worst, and as such some people expressed alarm as sightings of those animals increased in major metropolitan areas. Whether carnivores’ adapting to urban landscapes was a recent phenomenon or whether they had always been present (but only recently drew notice) became a topic of some debate. Intuitively, it seemed that as the world urbanized, tremendous evolutionary pressure would be placed on species of all types to find a way to capitalize on that transformation.

Scientists identified some general traits associated with successful urban carnivores. Most urban carnivores had small or medium body sizes, likely because large-bodied carnivores that required vast land areas for foraging were ill-suited to the fragmented nature of urban green space. Some researchers suggested that urban species could be more intelligent or that they might possess more-flexible behavioral characteristics that allowed them to exploit rapidly changing metropolitan areas. Most urban carnivore species had relatively quick reproductive rates, and nearly all were classified as dietary generalists—that is, they were capable of consuming a wide variety of foods. Such variability enabled them to take advantage of both natural and artificial food sources. In situations in which an animal became dependent on handouts and refuse, however, the risk of conflict with humans increased. Those trends were exemplified by some of the most-successful North American urban carnivores—such as raccoons (Procyon lotor), coyotes, andred foxes (Vulpes vulpes).

Whereas a great deal was known about the specific natural history of individual carnivore species, recent attention focused on how urban carnivores interacted with one another and with other species. Highly urban landscapes typically excluded traditional top predators such as wolves or bears, and the effects on the urban wildlife community that resulted were complex and difficult to predict. Some carnivore species could directly compete with one another for resources, whereas others might partition their habitat in either space or time to avoid overt confrontation. One prominent theory, termed “mesopredator release,” posited that as top predators were extirpated (removed) from an ecosystem, the medium-sized (or meso-) carnivores—such as foxes, coyotes, and raccoons—would proliferate rapidly. As mesopredator populations rose, they would bring about declines in populations of songbirds, small mammals, and perhaps even plant species—all of which may be reduced by protecting top carnivores in urban systems. The theory, developed during the late 1980s by American biologist Michael E. Soulé, was supported by empirical data for some regions but not for others, and much more research was thus needed.

Undoubtedly, much of the attention paid to carnivores in urban areas stemmed from odd behaviours—such as those described earlier—or direct interactions such as the invasion of attics by raccoons, close encounters with the noxious spray of skunks, or even carnivore attacks (which rarely targeted humans but more frequently involved pets). Consequently, much of the research and interest surrounding urban wildlife was somewhat adversarial. Most activities were categorized as “management,” which typically included actions such as capture followed by either euthanasia or transport to less-urbanized areas (such as woodlands and farmlands). Animal removal, however, often served as a short-term solution, because new individuals were likely to colonize those same habitats if conditions remained unchanged.

Planning for Effective Coexistence.

Only within the past few decades had people begun to seriously discuss the notion of conserving (or even reintroducing) carnivores into urban landscapes. Many of those arguments were made under the umbrella of “reconciliation ecology,” the notion that urban landscapes could be managed simultaneously for human needs and biodiversity. As the world continued to urbanize, many conservation biologists recognized that the conservation of rare and imperiled species in small, isolated nature preserves was proving to be increasingly difficult. Long-term conservation of biodiversity would be much more feasible, however, if urban complexes were modified to allow for wildlife protection. If that plan was adopted, the traditional view of cities as wastelands devoid of interesting species could change.

It was hoped that in the future, urban wildlife ecology would continue to evolve and provide the information necessary to conserve and manage animal species in the rapidly changing world. Much more data was needed from other regions—such as those in Asia and Africa and elsewhere—that were undergoing rapid urbanization. Perhaps more critical was the need for scientists to synthesize the data on multiple species and their interactions. An ecosystem-level view was required to understand systematically how urban carnivores persist, interact with other species, move across the landscape, and ultimately come into conflict with humans. Such knowledge would be essential to the process of building smarter cities that maximize the chance that people and wildlife would coexist peaceably. Along those lines, a tremendous need for studies that spanned multiple cities remained. Presently, findings were specific to individual metropolitan areas, but only by designing studies that collected data by using comparable methods across urban regions could universal patterns in urban species be identified. New networks, such as the Urban Wildlife Information Network (UWIN) and the Smithsonian Institution’s eMammal program, were being created for just that very purpose, and they would greatly enhance the ability of officials to make a place for wildlife in urban areas.